R3's CordaCon Event Sees Big News, Packed Talks and Blockchain Converts

The annual London gathering hosted by R3 to celebrate everything happening on the Corda platform and its developer community, appeared to be in rude health this year with standing room only in many of the presentations.

The headline news was the launch of Corda Marketplace, "a pseudo app store" or storefront for solutions on Corda comprising over 200 companies and "a place where you can discover new partners to help you build CorDapps," according to Rutter.

The U.K. government's HM Land Registry has chosen Corda as part of its Digital Street project, to make the house buying process simpler, faster, cheaper and more transparent.

Two major plays on Corda are insurance and trade finance.

It's notable that both B3i and TradeIX started out building on Hyperledger's Fabric platform before later converting to Corda.

De Crom said Corda "Provides a ton of tools that are readily usable for developers," but added the caveat that B3i used Corda a year later than the work being done on Hyperledger Fabric.

"You are comparing start of 2018 Corda, with start of 2017 Fabric. So some of the tools we had to code ourselves in Fabric were already available in Corda," he said.

Developers building trade finance solutions are divided mainly between R3 Corda on the one hand, and Hyperledger Fabric on the other with groups like we.

Regarding his own company switching from Hyperledger to Corda, Sutter said, "Fabric is an open-source protocol, yes, but the way it is supported and operationalized is not done in an open-source manner."

"In terms of validating and ordering transactions," he added, "You are really relying on IBM; in terms of deploying a node, you are relying on IBM BlueMix. Corda is cloud agnostic with an open and decentralized governance."